Kerux interview: Jon Meacham

Newsweek editor, historian, and author of American Gospel

Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek magazine, author of the recent book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, and is a frequent commentator on both politics and the role of faith in American life.

Meacham spoke at the January Series in the Fine Arts Center of Calvin College on Tuesday, January 16, and met with Kerux Editor in Chief Christian Bell before his speech to discuss online media, presidential rhetoric, and religion in journalism.

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Kerux: As a Newsweek reader, something that’s always perplexed me is the publication date of the magazine. It always seems like as soon as Newsweek comes out, the very next day something major happens. How do you decide what day to publish?

Jon Meacham: Decades and decades ago, probably in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, we came out in the middle of the week. Starting about the middle of Eisenhower’s [administration], we moved to closing on Saturday and publishing overnight. Our presses start at about 6:00 a.m. on Sunday. We’re usually done hopefully in time for dinner on Satuday, but not always.

The decision was that there was a certain rhythm both to the business week and to the Washington week that tended to culminate in people dropping bad news on Friday. You know, that’s the old joke if you’re a politician or a corporation, announce it on Friday afternoon so that you can get the Saturday paper and not the Sunday paper. But we believe that the people still want what we have to offer early on as they’re preparing for their own arc through a week, as opposed to coming out before the weekend when people have so much else to do.

Kerux: So when you have major stories that break on Monday or Tuesday, how do you approach it?

Meacham: That’s why God created the Internet, it really is. It was incredibly frustrating for decades, but now we can react and do as much as we want online for a huge audience, and then see how things feel throughout the week. We call it ‘rocking along.’ We rock along to see what we think is going to hold up and what won’t. It’s a tricky editorial task, because it means you have to guess on Friday what people are going to want to read on, say, Wednesday. It could have changed drastically.

It’s interesting that you say you think it happens often; I don’t find that. Probably once every quarter or so there’s something that blows up on a Sunday or a Monday, and depending on what happens on a Sunday, we can get in and do it. We arrested Saddam [Hussein], for instance, on a Sunday morning, and we were able to come back in. We started the Afghan bombing campaign on a Sunday, and we were able to get that. And if it’s overarching news, we’re just put out a different issue.

Kerux: On that, do you have the same sense that there’s a major decline in readership in printed media? I was just having dinner with one of the Grand Rapids Press editorial writers here recently, and he was saying that that’s a major concern of theirs.

Meacham: It’s a changing readership. I think that people are migrating online more rapidly than most people expected. And we’re in an interesting zone where every institution has to do both, not just one, whether you’re a TV broadcast, or a magazine, or a newspaper.

I was just talking to students, who – none of them read anything on a dead tree. It was also interesting, they didn’t go to one source; a lot of them have these Google pages where they make their own pages from feeds. That’s just the world we live in, so what we have to do is make our web product strong enough and distinctive enough that they want to put us on that homepage that they’re making.

I think it’s an interesting challenge. I mean, you can whine about it and roll over and die, but that wouldn’t get anybody very far. What you have to figure out is what’s distinctive about what you’re offering, whether you’re the Grand Rapids Press or Newsweek or The Today Show or whatever. How do you make your voice heard in a sea of competing images? At least on television, people may click by you on television, but they’ve got to stop for a second. And they may want to do other things with their time than read a magazine, but they have to pick it up for a second to look at it. So you still have a moment to make the sale, metaphorically, which you don’t necessarily have online because so much of it goes past your homepage.

It’s a great problem, because if we have a really interesting story it will be linked in a gazillion places around the web, and that’ll drive our traffic numbers, but people are coming to the story, not to Newsweek, so it has the vices of its virtues. I’d rather have that problem than the other, which is none.

Kerux: We’re of course here just coming out of finishing all the activities for Gerald R. Ford’s funeral. You had a nice piece in the Washington Post a few days after he passed away, and you had written in that piece, “Time and again in the American experience, the culture has been more in line with Ford’s views on the question of religious expression and thought in the public sphere.” What do you take that view to be, exactly?

Meacham: I was struck when I read both his first speech to the nation on August 9th and the pardon speech at how Lincolnesque they were in their explicitly theological content. He sounded very 18th and 19th century in the pardon speech, in which he said, “I’ll be judged not as a president but as a man if I’m not merciful.” It’s almost a Shakespearean understanding of the role of kingship; Shakespearean to David to Saul – people will be blessed or cursed based on the conduct of the king.

What I found when I wrote this book I wrote last year is if you climb inside virtually any president’s rhetoric, you find a lot more of that than you would think, for various reasons. Some of them meant it more than others. Words matter. It’s such a consistent thing that I don’t think you can understand the American presidency or, broadly put, American history without fully grappling with the role of religion in a pretty clear sense. It’s not necessarily Protestantism, it’s obviously not Catholicism, it’s not deism – it’s this sense, I talk about it in that piece too, this Benjamin Franklin sense of a public religion.

That is that one thing that, if one is a religious American, by definition, at least the one common thing is that they believe in, and Ford used this phrase, “a higher power.” He used that, I think, in the August 9 speech. And everything else becomes a matter of debate and possibly divisions, Tower of Bab’il and all that.

But there is that one potential source of unity. And the best presidents at our worst moments have used that to bring people together, and I think Ford did that, and that is what I mean by a cultural leitmotif, and I would actually argue it would be harder to find a counterexample.

Kerux: So are you suggesting that it was Ford’s particular religious language that was unifying? Because my sense is that President Bush’s religious language is divisive.

Meacham: It is.

Kerux: You did note that Ford’s language was obviously quite a bit different. Is that what’s to account for the difference between the unification and the division?

Meacham: I think President Bush is unfairly criticized for his religious language. I think he’s fully within the mainstream of presidential expression on those matters. It’s very hard to find sectarian allusions. You can find them, but go in search of ‘George Bush’ and ‘Jesus,’ you know? It’s hard. He, I think, has tried to unify more than divide on the question of faith, and I think that people who are out of swords with Bush about other things find his religious faith a convenient target, a convenient focus for their anger on other issues. And presidents who have not had big majorities, which Bush has never had, have had to put up with this.

I don’t think the religious language was probably noted at all when Ford was using it, because there was also the partisan fury about what he was doing. What I find interesting about it is you have to credit some degree of presidential rhetoric. And the fact that he thought he needed to talk that way reflects that he obviously believed that in the lives of his listeners, this would resonate. And there’s also the chance, every once in a while, that people mean what they say. You’ve got to allow for that.

Kerux: For yourself, how has your faith shaped the way you’ve gone about the business of reporting the news?

Meacham: I honestly don’t know. It’s an element in the compound of whatever I bring to whatever I do. It’s an important element. Is it any more important than the fact that I’m a Southerner or the fact that I love history or the sum of the experiences I’ve had along the way? It’s a mystery. I don’t know.

I like to think that whatever values we bring to the magazine are ones that people of good will, whether they are religious or not, will recognize and credit us for, so while you may disagree with us, you would never question our motives.

Kerux: Has it changed or impacted the way that other journalists view your work or interact with you at all? This place tries to downplay the notion that there is a strict separationism between being a Christian and just living your life, your vocation. And yet a lot of people feel like they are set apart in one sense or another by their faith, and they’re regarded by people differently and they have to act differently.

Meacham: I think that if I were an evangelical Christian, which I’m not, I think some of those issues that you raise would apply. I’m an Episcopalian. There are some questions at this hour whether we are still part of the Kingdom of our Lord. [laughs] I think that’s a difference that matters.

I also write about these things from a historical perspective, and what strikes me more and more is how little people know and how curious they are about “How did we get the canon of Scripture?” “What was Jesus really tried for?” “When were the Gospels written?” I think there are historical questions that perhaps you and I think of as just what you do and think about, that a lot of people don’t. So I think the fact that I either know about those things, or at least am interested enough to go out and report them, is something that sets me apart.

But there’s also a tradition in news magazines of doing this. I mean, we had Ken Woodward for years [who] did historical religious pieces, so there’s nothing new under the sun.

I was just telling the students, I never expected to ever have a conversation like this. I mean, it’s never occurred to me that this would be an issue of any kind, but there we are. But it’s perfectly fair.

There are all sorts of things I do that I think are good that I would like to ascribe to faith. There are all sorts of things I do that are probably bad that the faith would like to say, “Well that’s something else.” ‘Tis complicated.

Kerux: How did you get started in journalism, and what would be your advice to students and others wanting to break in?

Meacham: I got started because I loved politics, and I loved the personalities of political life, and how those personalities impact public life. I grew up around a courthouse crowd in Tennessee, all of whom could have been characters either in Faulkner or in Toby Keith, depending on the moment.

My advice is very simply, “Read, read, read, read, read.” Read history, read poetry, read novels. It’s much more important to get into the habit of mind that sees things whole than it is to know exactly how to get the truth out of the schoolboard. That will come. You can learn the craft of journalism as you go along. What’s harder to do, particularly if you’re a student, is to find the time to decide, “You know, I’m going to read all of William Manchester this year.” That’s the kind of thing I did, because I was a very strange child, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Always have a book around. No matter what it is; doesn’t matter. Because basically, journalism is about seeing things other people don’t that are right in front of you. That’s something you have to train yourself to do.

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